The top 3 objections to mobile money, and how to address them

When asking your customers and your team to use mobile money instead of your previous payment method, it is quite common to receive push-back and objections about this change. Mobile money is recent, and, like all innovations, some early adopters will be happy of the change and embrace it, most mainstream customers will be doubtful and need support, and a few late adopters will be quite hard to convince.

In this article, we cover the main objections that you will face, and how to address them.

There is no mobile money agent near my customers

First, a typical objection from the sales agents is that they are afraid that it will become harder for their prospects to buy if they have to use mobile money. This objection can be articulated in various ways, but typically the argument is that they think the customers are too far away from the mobile money agents (or the customers have told them so).

Overcoming this objection is mostly done by leveraging your preparation work, as this will usually be something you addressed when planning the introduction of mobile money. For instance, your market study might show that in your target areas, the density of mobile money agents is such that it will not be an issue for customers. In other cases, it might have shown that you need to open mobile money accounts for the customers, and that this will be the way to address the distance question. In a lot of cases, the study also shows clearly that the value of your product is so high than having to pay with mobile money is only a minor disadvantage.

The key point here is to communicate clearly to the sales agents that this question has been thought of, and how they can themselves address it.

Mobile money is expensive

Mobile money sometimes has a reputation of being expensive, a feeling that sales agents might convey back to you, or even share. This perception of mobile money being expensive is often linked to services that have decided the following:

They add mobile money as a new payment method

And they add the mobile money fees on top of their existing pricing.

In such cases, the customer is for instance paying $10 for the service when paying cash, and $10.5 when paying with mobile money ($10 + $0.5 fee). Typically, utilities proceed like this, and, as they are typically among the first ones to make mobile money payments available to their customers, this leads to this feeling that mobile money is expensive.

The solution to address the objection is to include the mobile money cost in your pricing from the beginning. This way, the customers do not have the feeling that they pay extra for the mobile money, even if they know that this is of course included in your cost structure. Even if you have to cover the mobile money fee, it is very likely that the savings of avoiding cash will more than compensate for that. And it gives the sales agents a great argument to convince their customers!

My customers do not know how to use mobile money

Finally, an objection often mentioned is the lack of knowledge about using mobile money, sometimes also presented as “my customers do not having mobile money accounts”. In both cases, the answer is training and explaining, first to the team, and then to the customers, the various techniques that are available to pay using mobile money. Those might include for instance:

Not needing to learn how mobile money works, and just go to the mobile money agent to do an “over the counter” transaction.

Explaining and adding documentation and training for the customers on how to perform mobile money transactions themselves from their phone.

Open a mobile money account with the customers, and train them on how to do perform transactions.

In all cases, this is part of the change management that needs to be covered during the transition, to make both the agents and the customers confident about the new method.

Conclusion

Like you would expect, preparation and training are the key elements to overcome the objections to mobile money, and, overall, success depends on the ability of turning your sales agents into mobile money promoters.

Once this is done, they will be able to convince the customers, and things will roll out easily!